Peace and War

Thorbjørn Jagland, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, in presenting the Peace Prize to Barack Obama last week, quoted the previous African-American recipient, Martin Luther King, Jr., and added, “Mr. President, we are happy to see that through your presence here so much of Dr. King’s dream has come true.” Obama nodded and pursed his lips in the kind of grimace that passes over his face when he’s moved. Perhaps he was thinking of a key passage in the speech that he was about to give—lines that opened up a certain distance from the nonviolent doctrine of King and Mahatma Gandhi. “As a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone,” Obama said, when it was his turn at the lectern. “I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.”

There was no way for the President to avoid mentioning the apparent contradiction between his decision to send thirty thousand more troops to Afghanistan, which he announced two weeks ago at West Point, and his receiving the Peace Prize. But, instead of disposing of it in a perfunctory gesture, he made it the basis of his address, devoting the first half of the speech to what he called the challenge of “reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths—that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly.” Working out apparent contradictions, reconciling irreconcilables, finding balances, living with paradox—these are the intellectual bread and butter of Obama’s politics. “We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice,” Obama concluded. “We can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace.” He is the negative-capability President.

In Oslo in 1964, King used soaring oratory that pitted love and violence as opposites in a cosmic struggle. Forty-five years later, Obama employed the language of a complex and tempered hope. He identified less with the utopianism of King than with the moral realism of John F. Kennedy. He spoke of the “difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace,” adding, “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution.” After discussing the difficulty of balancing exhortation and diplomacy in the promotion of human rights, he admitted, “There is no simple formula here.” But this philosophical modesty isn’t only the difference between a politician and a prophet; Obama has been changed by the Presidency. Compare the Nobel speech to the one he gave in Berlin’s Tiergarten in July, 2008, in which he envisioned a renewal of the transatlantic partnership, and summoned his two hundred thousand ecstatic listeners to tear down all remaining walls between peoples. Last week, Obama did not tell Europeans what they wanted to hear, and the response of the invited audience at Oslo City Hall, whose décor seemed to have been inspired by that of a progressive pre-school, was distinctly muted.

Between these two speeches, the President spent months deciding whether and why to send young Americans to kill and die in Afghanistan. He seems to have emerged from the intense self-education of this policy review, which included visits to Walter Reed hospital and Arlington National Cemetery, with a new resolve about his power as Commander-in-Chief. In Oslo, Obama was in effect calling the bluff of absolutists on both the right and the left. The evangelical idealism and blunt militarism of President George W. Bush did more to taint than to advance the cause of human rights. Both at West Point and in Oslo, Obama’s realistic appraisal of a worldwide landscape of bad options served as an implicit rebuke to the simplifications of his predecessor. And yet American weapons and bloodshed, not the dream of world peace, he said, have “helped underwrite global security for more than six decades.” There are no good options, but that doesn’t relieve Americans of the responsibility to choose, and at times, if necessary, to choose the path of “human folly.”

No Obama doctrine yet exists. What the President has is a sophisticated theology, an anti-utopian belief that human imperfection is inevitable but progress is possible if human beings remain self-critical about what they can achieve. This is the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Obama has called “one of my favorite philosophers.” One evening in 2007, after leaving the Senate floor, Obama said of Niebuhr, to the Times’ David Brooks:

I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.

The spirit of Niebuhr presided over the Nobel address. Neither idealist nor realist, Obama seemed to be saying that universal values and practical geopolitics exist in the same tension as war and peace. The readiness is all—the ability to discern opportunities and not be hemmed in by rigid abstractions. The President cited Nixon’s overture to Mao during the Cultural Revolution as an apparently inexcusable act that over the long run produced real improvements in the lives of the Chinese people. If something similar comes of Obama’s outreach to Iran, it, too, could be seen as a historic diplomatic breakthrough. At the moment, however, there’s no sign of progress.

In his address, Obama said, “When there is genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo, or repression in Burma, there must be consequences,” and he added, “We will bear witness to the quiet dignity of reformers like Aung San Suu Kyi; to the bravery of Zimbabweans who cast their ballots in the face of beatings; to the hundreds of thousands who have marched silently through the streets of Iran.” This was the least convincing passage of the speech: so far, there have been no consequences in places like Darfur, and bearing witness—or at least such low-key witness—to Iranian protesters has done nothing to sway the mullahs. The weakness of Obama’s strategic flexibility is that it depends so heavily on practical skill, above all in diplomacy, a field in which America has lost its touch over the past two decades. Failure will seem like a failure of vision and principle.

Obama’s Peace Prize has been fairly called premature—a criticism that the President himself endorsed, first when the award was announced, in October, and again in Oslo. It was given more for who he is and what he says than for anything that he has done. The speech exemplified a quality of wisdom that could place his legacy among those of previous winners, such as George C. Marshall and Nelson Mandela, against whose achievements he belittled his own. On the other hand, the 2009 Peace Prize could end up like the 1926 version, which went to Aristide Briand, the co-author of a pact outlawing war. The results will tell. ♦

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